Angels and Earthly Creatures. Claire M. Waters
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two traditions, which illuminate each other and clarify our understanding of what it meant to medieval preachers to be the mouth of God, to hold an angelic office in human form.26 In so doing, it builds on and helps to connect recent areas of lively inquiry in medieval studies. While the place of the female body in religious practice, for instance, in both its negative and positive valences, has been subtly and intensively investigated in recent scholarship, the male body is only beginning to receive such attention. Several recent essay collections on medieval masculinity and book-length studies such as Dyan Elliott’s work on clerical bodies and their potential for sin show the growing interest in this area; the preaching manuals can complement such work by considering the pitfalls of masculine self-presentation, the dangers offered by the male flesh in performance, and the implications of masculine embodiment for the institutional hierarchy of the church.27
From another angle, Christ’s body, especially in its relationship to the Eucharist and to affective devotion, has been the topic of much excellent and influential work in the last few years.28 A study of preachers, who were encouraged to model themselves explicitly on the physical presence and activity of Christ, enhances our sense of how the Middle Ages understood the ultimately important body and how that understanding reflected on the bodies of those who represented him. The study of works by preachers thus offers a “historically contingent version of Christ’s humanity” that can supplement what David Aers, following Sarah Beckwith, calls the “commonplace” of “the humanity of Christ” as the suffering, bleeding body of Passion meditations and other late medieval devotional works. The version of Christ’s humanity imagined in the preaching manuals tends to be closer to the one that Aers calls “the Gospels’ Jesus … [m]obile, articulate, teaching, healing.”29
Finally, the hybridity inherent in preaching can help us to understand certain competing trends of the later Middle Ages, for which the body of the preacher was in some sense a staging ground. These trends are represented by two important strands in recent medieval scholarship: the study of women’s religious experience and devotion, exemplified by the work of Caroline Walker Bynum; and the literary examination of scholastic and canon-law texts, such as the work of Alastair Minnis. These fields, while not in competition, have remained more separate in modern scholarship than their subjects would have been in their original medieval context. But they have much to say to one another, and this book benefits from and will, I hope, contribute to their productive cross-fertilization. Stephen Jaeger has recently explored the relationship between bodily and textual authority in the school culture of the high Middle Ages, arguing that the eleventh and twelfth centuries saw a shift from charismatic body to charismatic text.30 In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries a similar intensification of focus on the dignity of the office of preaching and its textual mandate, rather than on the person of the preacher, warred with the ongoing awareness of the physical side of the preacher’s activity. Discussions of the office of preacher enable an examination of widespread late medieval concerns with embodiment and authority in a particular context and can offer a new window onto the medieval perception, and (attempted) resolution, of such competing ideas.
The effort to manage the physical aspect of preaching in relation to its textual foundations is a crucial undertaking of the preaching manuals. For this reason the artes praedicandi most closely examined here are the ones that give extensive attention to matters, such as the preacher’s relationship to his office or his self-presentation, beyond the purely technical aspects of sermon construction.31 Since appropriate transmission of the Word of God was essential to the spiritual health of the faithful laity and the institutional health of the orthodox church, the preacher’s body had an importance far beyond its own boundaries—boundaries that could be unstable, as recent work suggests.32 A study of the preacher’s vulnerable humanity and his hybrid status can help us to understand the “necessary interrelationship and ultimate interdependence” of the varied and sometimes competing discourses (those of heterodoxy, canon law, pastoral care, and affective spirituality, among others) that made up the world of medieval Christianity.33 The negotiations between textuality and embodiment, between authorization and authority, that underlie many of these conflicts are a fundamental concern of the preaching theorists and the subject of this book.
The chapters that follow explore in more detail the need both to establish and to cross boundaries that characterized medieval preaching. The first four chapters address the building blocks of the preacher’s role: his authorization, his persona, and his language. “The Golden Chains of Citation” looks at the concern with definitions and boundaries that characterized late medieval discussions of the preacher’s institutional authorization and draws on modern performance theory to examine the implications of their attempt to create an unbreakable and impermeable lineage of preachers. In “Holy Duplicity: The Preacher’s Two Faces” I turn to the problem of the preacher’s “person,” both as a physical body and as a persona presented to the world; this chapter also introduces Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales into the discussion, focusing particularly on the Parson and the Pardoner. Chaucer’s role here and later is not merely decorative. It is clear from the Tales that Chaucer, as G. G. Sedgewick long ago noted, “got himself steeped in all the dyes of traditional preaching before he set about creating the Canterbury Tales and several of the pilgrims in it,” an apt metaphor given how naturally preaching concerns seem woven into the fabric of various tales.34 While many medieval literary texts respond to and are shaped by preaching traditions, it is my contention that Chaucer’s poem, with its intense emphasis on speech, embodiment, and authority, illuminates some central issues in preaching theory by presenting them in concentrated (and personified) form.35 The third chapter, “A Manner of Speaking: Access and the Vernacular,” considers the preacher not only as a translator in a linguistic sense, but also as a mediator between cultures who needed both to form a connection with and to maintain his distinctness from his audience. “ ‘Mere Words’: Gendered Eloquence and Christian Preaching” explores the long-standing association between rhetoric and femininity and the implications of using a worldly, morally neutral form to convey a spiritual message.
The final three chapters turn from the first section’s primary focus on male preachers—in which women, nonetheless, often play an important part—to look at women preachers, fictional and real, more directly. “Transparent Bodies and the Redemption of Rhetoric” examines how the legendary preaching of certain women saints helped to address the anxieties raised by the allure of rhetoric and by the preacher’s physicality. “The Alibi of Female Authority” considers the efforts of three historical women, Hildegard of Bingen, Birgitta of Sweden, and Catherine of Siena, to rework the clerical conceptions of preacherly speech and authorization that excluded them and to provide themselves with a place from which they could proclaim their message to the church. Finally, “Sermones ad Status and Old Wives’ Tales; or, The Audience Talks Back” looks at the preoccupation of the Canterbury Tales with competing voices and speaking bodies in light of the work’s origins in the preaching form known as sermones ad status, sermons to various types or classes of people. I argue that the figure of the Wife of Bath represents, in a sense, the logical outcome of trends already present in preaching and that her peculiar combination of feminine and clerical modes of speech allows Chaucer to appropriate the necessary hybridity of preachers’ discourse in creating his own poetic voice.
In all of these chapters, I have tried to let the preoccupations of the medieval texts examined here—debate literature, hagiography, canon law, poetry, and above all the artes praedicandi themselves—direct my own interests. The extraordinary care, attention, and energy devoted to preaching by the authors of these various texts suggest the importance of their subject: a mode of speech and performance that offered, in their view, not an imitation of life, but access to the life eternal. Respect for the high aims and seriousness of preaching at its best, however, should not prevent us from exploring its human—and thus at times less than ideal—qualities and characteristics. “Official” and orthodox discussions of preaching show where the theorists’ concerns lie, but if we accept these straightforwardly on their own terms, we see only half the picture. By considering theory in the light of practice, the acceptable in juxtaposition with the excluded, and above all, the productive and destructive interactions of the preacher’s human body with the authoritative message he worked